Recommendation engine

A recommender system or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing "system" with a synonym such as platform or engine) is a subclass of information filtering system that seeks to predict the "rating" or "preference" that a user would give to an item.

Recommender systems have become increasingly popular in recent years, and are utilized in a variety of areas including movies, music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags, and products in general. There are also recommender systems for experts, collaborators, jokes, restaurants, garments, financial services, life insurance, romantic partners (online dating), and Twitter pages.

Recommender systems typically produce a list of recommendations in one of two ways – through collaborative and content-based filtering or the personality-based approach.Collaborative filtering approaches building a model from a user's past behaviour (items previously purchased or selected and/or numerical ratings given to those items) as well as similar decisions made by other users. This model is then used to predict items (or ratings for items) that the user may have an interest in.Content-based filtering approaches utilize a series of discrete characteristics of an item in order to recommend additional items with similar properties. These approaches are often combined (see Hybrid Recommender Systems).

The differences between collaborative and content-based filtering can be demonstrated by comparing two popular music recommender systems – Last.fm and Pandora Radio.

Each type of system has its own strengths and weaknesses. In the above example, Last.fm requires a large amount of information on a user in order to make accurate recommendations. This is an example of the cold start problem, and is common in collaborative filtering systems. While Pandora needs very little information to get started, it is far more limited in scope (for example, it can only make recommendations that are similar to the original seed).

Recommender systems are a useful alternative to search algorithms since they help users discover items they might not have found by themselves. Interestingly enough, recommender systems are often implemented using search engines indexing non-traditional data.

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Wikipedia